Curbing Violence against Women

In a survey carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2005, out of the ten counties surveyed, more than 50 percent of women in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Peru and Tanzania reported having been subjected to physical or sexual violence by intimate partners, with figures reaching a staggering 71 percent in rural Ethiopia. Only in Japan, less than 20 percent of women report incidents of domestic violence.

Although Pakistan is a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly, not much has been done in this regard. Consisting of a preamble and 30 articles, the CEDAW defines what constitutes discrimination against women and sets up an agenda for national action to end such discrimination.

The General Assembly, designated November 25, as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in memorandum of the brutal 1961 assassination of the three Mirabal Sisters, political activists in the Domination Republic, on the orders of Dominacan dictator Rafael Trujillo. The three Mirabal sisters, Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa, were violently assassinated. The unarmed sisters were abducted and led into a sugarcane field, then beaten and strangled to death. Their car was later thrown off of a mountain known as La Cumbre, between the Cities of Santiago and Puerto Plata. ‘Unforgettable butterflies,’ became a symbol of the crisis of violence against women in Latin America. This date was chosen to commemorate their lives and promote global recognition of gender violence, and has been observed in Latin America since the 1980s. the dictator Rafael considered that he had eliminated the problem by killing the sisters, but their deaths brought great protests and led to the assassination of Rafael six months later.

The report for the third quarter of the year 2008 reported 2,531 cases of violence against women in the Pakistan. Most of the cases (1,592) were reported in Punjab, Sindh reported 402 incidents of violence against women, the NWFP 251, Balochistan 220 and Islamabad 66. These statistics indicate a rise in the rate of violence against women in 2008.

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